Baker Artist Portfolios

"Pixel-lapse" photography is the process of creating an image one pixel at a time. Beginning in the upper left corner, pixels are captured sequentially at a set rate until the entire image is formed.

Scroll (2010, any instruments) is a continuation of a series of "Structural scores" that started with Book (2006). It is a single 8.5x88 inch composition of black ink on white paper and is presented without instructions. The notation is fantastically unsystematic and confounds even the composer at times. At any point you may fall off the edge of the world. But that's okay because free fall is how we understand salience. The reader/performer is invited to fall as they may through their own quiddity - real or imagined - rectifying an interrelationship with the text.

Puppet Games was my first album, released on cassette in 1998 when I was sixteen. It was inspired by my friends, and my increasing interest in psychedelic consciousness, mysticism, and electronic music. The songs range from gothic-industrial ballads to experimental psychedelic excursions. The music was recorded in my parents' basement on a four-track cassette machine using a desktop computer, acoustic and electric guitars, a mandolin, a yamaha keyboard, random objects, a CD of bird sounds, and an effects processor.

The Great American Canyon Band is the collaborative partnership of Paul Masson and his wife, Krystal Masson, and an ever changing line up of local musicians coming together for the purpose of creating music as vast and organic as the American landscape. The groups coining name defines the artist's intention to create contemporary orchestral compositions that are rooted in such American music traditions as blues, gospel, folk, country and americana. Working with Producer Chris Freeland (Wye Oak, Oxes) The Great American Canyon Band releases the EP, Wild Heart.

Live performance of The Great American Canyon Band at the Metro Gallery.

The daxophone, pictured, has unlimited potential for making new (singing, grunting, hooting, drumming, scatching) noises.  It's played by clamping a piece of thin wood, bowing it, and placing another heavy piece of wood on it to change the vibrating length. Each carefully chosen and shaped pieces of wood are called tongues. They are both a sonic and visual art. Each is unique in wood grain, shape, and sound.

The concept drawings for Interspecies Dwellings began as photos of architectural urban decay or suburban infiltration and are then altered to exist as Utopian interspecies dwellings.

In these Interspecies Dwelling spaces, migratory chimney swifts have taken over war ravaged city towers, termite castles open up to landscape of lawn croquet, an underwater city has become the skeleton of a rejuvenating coral reef, and race horses (are cut loose of their Jockey's and) frolic in a carless wildflower alpine mountain city.

These images were made at Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County, California. This body of work was inspired by my first experience with the coast of the Pacific Northwest in the late 90s. Being from the east coast I was taken aback by the landscape.

The black and white photographs in this series, made with a modified Holga camera, are the result of a contemplative interaction with the terrain. They interpret the topography and the constant flux of the environment and the impact of the elements upon the landscape.

Baltimore band Fractal Cat emphasizes classic songwriting, a strong vocal presence, and a multilayered psychedelic sound. Originally the solo studio endeavor of songwriter Miles Gannett, the project evolved into a six-piece rock ensemble. Fractal Cat weaves pop songs and vocal craft influenced by greats from Buddy Holly to Smokey Robinson with sonic exploration in the spirit of early Pink Floyd and Gong.

Selected Group Performances